Images of Thomas Becket in the Middle Ages and Beyond

The Uses and Reception of a Celebrity Saint

By: Alyce A Jordan (Editor), Kay Brainerd Slocum (Editor), Eliot Benbow, Madeline H Caviness, Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo

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eBook | 3 April 2025

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Explores the commemoration and memorialisation of the Canterbury martyr in visual and material culture.

In life, and especially in death, Thomas Becket was nothing short of a medieval celebrity, whose significance spanned the European high Middle Ages in to the sixteenth-century. Henry VIII's suppression of his cult in 1536 only served to enhance his popularity elsewhere. Visual depictions of his life, high-profile careers, spectacular demise, and posthumous legacies, are numerous. These images document both the extent, and the efficacy, of his invocation across religious, political and civic agendas. Becket remains the stuff of literature and legend, art, drama and cultural commodification.

This volume explores Becket imagery, both in such traditional media as stained glass and illuminated manuscripts, and less common objects: toys, baptismal fonts, and vernacular almanacs. Its essays provide new interpretations of the archaeological, iconographic, and historiographic spectrum of Becket imagery by, for example, deconstructing religious-secular binaries in the study of pilgrim badges and revising long-established interpretations of Canterbury stained glass. They also expand the Becket visual canon into broader geographic and temporal contexts, from medieval Denmark and Spain to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and twenty-first-century Boston. Meanwhile, contributions which look at the appropriation and use of Becket imagery in the aftermath of the English Reformation break new ground in scrutinizing a subject well traversed in text, but that has only begun to be explored in visual and material culture.